Karen Jennings
At first, it was a novelty and wasn’t sure how to behave. For a time he stood in the centre of the room, then, stepping forward to the window, he looked out. Through it; a metre away, he saw the wall of the opposite building. In the days that followed, he stayed in the room, thinking of no other thing than looking out through the window.
In the mornings and evenings when the water boiled on the stove, steaming up the glass, he would wipe the pane carefully and noticed the way the bricks rippled and steadied before him. He did not know what he was looking for; there was nothing to see, really. The wall remained unchanged.
With time, he learnt the pattern of the bricks; the neat rows, and the lines of cement. He felt their shapes filling him up. By the end of the week, the bricks sat in his eyes so that when the window misted he no longer needed to wipe it clean. He found a newspaper and some tapes to cover the window. After that he began looking down when he was in the room.
***
In the early morning, cool air touched his cheeks and ears as he walked. From beyond the streets and buildings, there was a smell of salt and the sound of calling gulls. He walked with his hands in his pockets, taking small and slowed steps, careful to balance as he climbed off and onto pavements. Before him the sky was grey over a grey mountain, behind him the sun begins to show pink. To his left the flower sellers unpacked.
Cramping the pavement, buckets and buckets of flowers were unloaded from vans. There was nowhere to walk. He stood for a while and watched. After a night alone in the room, all the colours surprised him by the chattering of men and women, by the smell of flowers that weighed him down. By nightfall, he knew, they will be gone, the pavement scattered with the remains. Now the breath of flowers was heavy in the air.
It was uncertain where he came from and he had no memory of anything before; only of the place where they sold flowers. It was where he, once, chose to make a nest for himself and where he had continued to return night after night. It was there that he breathed all night of the damp smell of the pavement on which the content of the buckets emptied, where leaves and petals lay.
He remembered the scent at dawn, when the trucks arrived, laden with their buckets of flowers, loud with the flower sellers calling out to each other. At this cue he would stretch and unstiffen, rising to earn a few coins by unloading the trucks. The names he never bothered to learn, but he knew, still knows, each flower by its scent. Come back at six, they’d say. We’ll pay you to help us pack away. But he never did. He could not risk having money on him after dark.
He continued to walk, passing shops now, keeping his eyes on the ground, watching where he stepped. His heart taught him the observance’s rule. He learnt it years ago; scanning pavements and gutters for coins with which he could buy single sweets, single cigarettes. He was yet to unlearn the habit, and often he would stoop for brown coins, despite the humiliation of manoeuvring his legs in such a way that made it possible.
Behind him, three women talked loudly, shouted at each other as they walked side by side. Their voices caught him; calling, they pass him, turned their heads slightly to look at him, greet him. He lowered his head further, did not acknowledge them. He waited for them to turn a corner before he continued walking up the street. At the traffic lights he stopped. That was where he would stand for the rest of the day.
By noon, his knee locked. By three, he would be in pain but he could not sit. If he sat he was glared at, resentment. Therefore, he stood. It was still early, only a few cars passed, the drivers frowning. As he stood, he felt the wall before him. The rows of bricks were around him; he thought about them, tasted them. He rarely spoke and if he did, the wall was on his tongue. His words patterned into bricks and cement.
Standing there, he could see back down the long road. Towards the end of the road, he knew, in a circle of traffic, was an island with a fountain. He could not get to it nowadays; he was not agile enough to dart through the moving cars, but as a boy, he spent long afternoons there, cooling his feet in the water. He remembered the mulch of litter and bird droppings that lined the fountain, how they sucked at his toes, how they clouded and pooled around his feet.
With seagulls and pigeons sitting nearby, he longed for sunset, staring back up towards the city, watching as the light faded slowly behind the mountain. It was the Christmas lights he was waiting for, for that moment when the road before him would become a mass of shapes and shifting lights, everything colouring and moving, indistinguishable, alive, against a black sky.
The day was warmer. Around him, there was noise. Cars slow and speed up. Vendors called to each other as they set up their stalls on the pavements. Shop owners swept, washed windows, men and women walked to work, looked clean and tired. Everywhere, people were on the move. Everything was moving.
All around him, the city seemed to grow taller. Buildings stretched above him. He felt drawn out; he felt his head pulled upwards, his face pulled towards the sky. He could not look down. His head was full of car fumes, of sea air, of flowers and coffee. His tongue felt bound; his eyes took in the sky and the tops of the buildings. In all of that, the noise and motion, the elongating and stretching, he stood still as the city lengthened around him and the scent of the morning filled his nostrils.
